Catch Me If You Can (16 page)

“I’m wondering, could I write you a check on my bank in Philadelphia and you issue me a cashier’s check, payable to cash, for $15,000? I realize you’ll have to call my bank to verify that I have the money, but I’ll pay for the call. I really want this house. It would mean I could spend half my time down here.” I paused, a pleading look on my face.

She pursed her lips prettily. “What’s the name of your bank in Philadelphia, and your account number?” she asked. I gave her the name of the bank, the telephone number and my account number. She walked to a desk and, picking up the telephone, called Philadelphia.

“Bookkeeping, please,” she said when she was connected. Then: “Yes, I have a check here, drawn on account number 505-602, Mr. Frank Adams, in the amount of $15,000.1 would like to verify the check, please.”

I held my breath, suddenly aware of the burly bank guard standing in one corner of the lobby. It had been my experience that clerks in bank bookkeeping departments, when asked to verify a check, merely looked at the balance.

They rarely went behind the request to check on the status of the account. I hoped that would be the case here. If not, well, I could only hope the bank guard was a lousy shot.

I heard her say, “All right, thank you,” and then she replaced the receiver and looked at me with a speculative expression. “Tell you what, Frank Adams,” she said with another of her brilliant smiles. “I’ll take your check if you’ll come to a party I’m having tonight. I’m short of handsome and charming men. How about it?”

“You got a deal,” I said, grinning, and wrote her a check on the Philadelphia bank for $15,000, receiving in return a $15,000 cashier’s check, payable to cash.

I went to the party. It was a fantastic bash. But then she was a fantastic lady-in more ways than several.

I cashed the check the next morning, returned the Rolls-Royce and caught a plane for San Diego. I reflected on the woman and her party several times during the flight and nearly laughed out loud when I was struck with one thought.

I wondered what her reaction would be when she learned she’d treated me to two parties on the same day, and the one had been a real cash ball.

I developed a scam for every occasion and sometimes I waived the occasion. I modified the American banking system to suit myself and siphoned money out of bank vaults like a coon drains an egg. When I jumped the border into Mexico in late 1967,1 had illicit cash assets of nearly $500,000 and several dozen bank officials had crimson derrieres.

It was practically all done with numbers, a statistical shell game with the pea always in my pocket.

Look at one of your own personal checks. There’s a check number in the upper right-hand corner, right? Thaf s probably the only one you notice, and you notice it only if you keep an accurate check register. Most people don’t even know their own account number, and while a great number of bank employees may be able to decipher the bank code numbers across the bottom of a check, very few scan a check that closely.

In the 1960s bank security was very lax, at least as far as I was concerned. It was my experience, when presenting a personal check, drawn on a Miami bank, say, to another Miami bank, about the only security precaution taken by the teller was a glance at the number in the upper right-hand corner. The higher that number, the more readily acceptable the check. It was as if the teller was telling herself or himself, “Ah-hah, check number 2876-boy, this guy has been with his bank a long time. This check’s gotta be okay.”

So I’m in an East Coast city, Boston, for example. I open an account in the Bean State Bank for $200, using the name Jason Parker and a boardinghouse address. Within a few days, I receive 200 personalized checks, numbered 1-200 consecutively in the upper right-hand corner, my name and address in the left-hand corner and, of course, that string of odd little numbers across the left-hand bottom edge. The series of numbers commenced with the numbers 01, since Boston is located within the First Federal Reserve District.

The most successful cattle rustlers in the Old West were experts at brand blotting and brand changing. I was an expert in check number blotting and changing, using press-on numbers and press-on magnetic-tape numbers.

When I finished with check number 1, it was check number 3100, and the series of numbers above the left-hand bottom edge started with the number 12. Otherwise, the check looks the same.

Now I walk into the Old Settlers Farm and Home Savings Association, which is just a mile from the Bean State Bank. “I want to open a savings account,” I tell the clerk who greets me. “My wife tells me we’re keeping too much money in a checking account.”

“All right, sir, how much do you wish to deposit?” he or she asks. Let’s say it’s a he. Bank dummies are divided equally among the sexes.

“Oh, $6,500,1 guess,” I reply, writing out a check to the OSFHSA. The teller takes the check and glances at the number in the upper right-hand corner. He also notices it’s drawn on the Bean State Bank. He smiles. “All right, Mr. Parker. Now, there is a three-day waiting period before you can make any withdrawals. We have to allow time for your check to clear, and since it’s an in-town check the three-day waiting period applies.”

“I understand,” I reply. I do, too. I’ve already ascertained that’s the waiting period enforced by savings and loan institutions for in-town checks.

I wait six days and on the morning of the sixth day I return to Old Settlers. But I deliberately seek out a different teller. I hand him my passbook. “I need to withdraw $5,500,” I say. If the teller had questioned the amount of the withdrawal, I would have said that I was buying a house or given some other plausible reason. But few savings and loan bank tellers pry into a customer’s personal affairs.

This one didn’t. He checked the account file. The account was six days old. The in-town check had obviously cleared. He returned my passbook with a cashier’s check for $5,500.

I cashed it at the Bean State Bank and left town… before my check for $6,500 returned from Los Angeles, where the clearing-house bank computer had routed it.

I invested in another I-Tek camera and printing press and did the same thing with my phony Pan Am expense checks. I made up different batches for passing in different areas of the country, although all the checks were purportedly payable by Chase Manhattan Bank, New York.

New York is in the Second Federal Reserve District. Bona fide checks on banks in New York all have a series of numerals beginning with the number 02. But all the phony checks I passed on the East Coast, or in northeastern or southeastern states, were routed first to San Francisco or Los Angeles. All the phony checks I passed in the Southwest, Northwest or along the West Coast were first routed to Philadelphia, Boston or some other point across the continent.

My numbers game was the perfect system for floats and stalls. I always had a week’s running time before the hounds picked up the spoor. I learned later that I was the first check swindler to use the routing numbers racket. It drove bankers up the wall. They didn’t know what the hell was going on. They do now, and they owe me.

I worked my schemes overtime, all over the nation, until I decided I was just too hot to cool down. I had to leave the country. And I decided I could worry about a passport in Mexico as fretfully as I could in Richmond or Seattle, since all I needed to visit Mexico was a visa. I obtained one from the Mexican Consulate in San Antonio, using the name Frank Williams and presenting myself as a Pan Am pilot, and deadheaded to Mexico City on an Aero-Mexico jet.

I did not take the entire proceeds of my crime spree with me. Like a dog with access to a butcher-shop bone box and forty acres of soft ground, I buried my loot all over the United States, stashing stacks of cash in bank safe-deposit boxes from coast to coast and from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border.

I did take some $50,000 with me into Mexico, concealed in thin sheafs in the lining of my suitcases and the linings of my jackets. A good customs officer could have turned up the cash speedily, but I didn’t have to go through customs. I was wearing my Pan Am uniform and was waived along with the AeroMexico crew.

I stayed in Mexico City a week. Then I met a Pan Am stewardess, enjoying a five-day holiday in Mexico, and accepted her invitation to go to Acapulco for a weekend. We were airborne when she suddenly groaned and said a naughty word. “What’s the matter?” I asked, surprised to hear such language from such lovely lips.

“I meant to cash my paycheck at the airport,” she said. “I’ve got exactly three pesos in my purse. Oh, well, I guess the hotel will cash it.”

“I’ll cash it, if it’s not too much,” I said. “I’m sending my own check off tonight for deposit, and I can just run it through my bank. How much is it?”

I really didn’t care how much cash was involved. A real Pan Am check! I wanted it. I got it for $288.15, and stowed it carefully away. I never did cash it, although it netted me a fortune.

I liked Acapulco. It teemed with beautiful people, most of them rich, famous or on the make for something or other, sometimes all three. We stayed at a hotel frequented by airline crews, but I never felt in jeopardy. Acapulco is not a place one goes to talk shop.

I stayed on after the stewardess returned to her base in Miami. And the hotel manager became friendly with me, so friendly that I decided to sound him out on my dilemma.

He joined me at dinner one night and since he seemed in an especially affable mood, I decided to make a try then and there. “Pete, I’m in a helluva jam,” I ventured.

“The hell you are!” he exclaimed in concerned tones.

“Yeah,” I replied. “My supervisor in New York just called me. He wants me to go to London on the noon plane from Mexico City tomorrow and pick up a flight that’s being held there because the pilot is sick.”

Pete grinned. “That’s a jam? I should have your troubles.”

I shook my head. “The thing is, Pete, I don’t have my passport with me. I left it in New York and I’m supposed to have it with me all the time. I can’t make it back to New York in time to get my passport and get to London on schedule. And if the super learns I’m here without a passport, he’ll fire me. What the hell am I gonna do, Pete?”

He whistled. “Yeah, you are in a jam, aren’t you?” His features took on a musing look, and then he nodded. “I don’t know that this will work, but have you ever heard of a woman named Kitty Corbett?”

I hadn’t and said so. “Well, she’s a writer on Mexican affairs, an old dame. She’s been down here twenty or thirty years and is real respected. They say she has clout from the Presidential Palace in Mexico City to Washington, D.C., the White House even, I understand. I believe it, too.” He grinned. “The thing is, that’s her at the table by the window. Now, I know she plays mamma to every down-and-out American who puts a con on her, and she loves to do favors for anybody who seeks her out wanting something. Makes her feel like the queen mother, I guess. Anyway, let’s go over and buy her a drink, put some sweet lines on her and cry a little. Maybe she can come up with an answer.”

Kitty Corbett was a gracious old woman. And sharp. After a few minutes, she smiled at Pete. “Okay, innkeeper, what’s up? You never sit down with me unless you want something. What is it this time?”

Pete threw up his hands and laughed. “I don’t want a thing, honest! But Frank here has a problem. Tell her, Frank.”

I told her virtually the same story I’d put on Pete, except I went a little heavier on the melodrama. She looked at me when I finished. “You need a passport real bad, I’d say,” she commented.

“Trouble is, you’ve got one. If s just in the wrong place. You can’t have two passports, you know. Thaf s illegal.”

“I know,” I said, grimacing. “That worries me, too. But I can’t lose this job. It might be years before another airline picked me up, if at all. I was on Pan Am’s waiting list for three years.” I paused, then exclaimed, “Flying jet liners is all I ever wanted to do!”

Kitty Corbett nodded sympathetically, lost in thought.

Then she pursed her mouth. “Pete, get me a telephone over here.”

Pete signaled and a waiter brought a telephone to the table and plugged it into a nearby wall jack. Kitty Corbett picked it up, jiggled the hook and then began talking to the operator in Spanish. It required several minutes, but she was put through to whomever she was calling.

“Sonja? Kitty Corbett here,” she said. “Listen, I’ve got a favor to ask…” She went on and detailed my predicament and then listened as the party on the other end replied.

“I know all that, Sonja,” she said. “And I’ve got it figured out. Just issue him a temporary passport, just as you would if his had been lost or stolen. Hell, when he gets back to New York he can tear up the temporary passport, or tear up the old one and get a new one.”

She listened again for a minute, then held her hand over the receiver and looked at me. “You don’t happen to have your birth certificate with you, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I carry it in my wallet. It’s a little worn, but still legible.”

Kitty Corbett nodded and turned again to the phone. “Yes, Sonja, he has a birth certificate… You think you can handle it? Great! You’re a love and I owe you. See you next week.”

She hung up and smiled. “Well, Frank, if you can get to the American Consulate in Mexico City by ten o’clock tomorrow, Sonja Gundersen, the assistant consul, will issue you a temporary passport. You’ve lost yours, understand? And if you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.”

I kissed her and ordered a bottle of the best champagne. I even had a glass myself. Then I called the airport and found there was a flight leaving in an hour. I made a reservation and turned to Pete. “Listen, I’m going to leave a lot of my stuff here. I don’t have time to pack. Have someone pack what I leave and store it in your office, and I’ll pick it up in a couple of weeks, maybe sooner. I’m going to try and come back through here.”

I stuffed one suitcase with my uniform and one suit, and my money. Pete had a cab waiting when I went down to the lobby. I really liked the guy, and I wished there were some way to thank him.

I thought of a way. I laid one of my phony Pan Am checks on him. On the hotel he managed, anyway.

I cashed another one at the airport before boarding the flight to Mexico City. In Mexico City, I stowed my bag in a locker after changing into my Pan Am pilot’s garb and walked into Miss Gundersen’s office at 9:45 a.m.

Sonja Gundersen was a crisp, starched blonde and she didn’t waste any time. “Your birth certificate, please.”

I took it from my wallet and handed it to her. She scanned it and looked at me. “I thought Kitty said your name was Frank Williams. This says your name is Frank W. Abagnale, Jr.”

I smiled. “It is. Frank William Abagnale, Jr. You know Kitty. She had a little too much champagne last night. She kept introducing me to all her friends as Frank Williams, too. But I thought she gave you my full name.”

“She may have,” agreed Miss Gundersen. “I had trouble hearing a lot of what she said. These damned Mexican telephones. Anyway you’re obviously a Pan Am pilot, and part of your name is Frank William, so you must be the one.”

As instructed, I had stopped and obtained two passport-sized photographs. I gave those to Miss Gundersen, and walked out of the consulate building fifteen minutes later with a temporary passport in my pocket. I went back to the airport and changed into a suit and bought a ticket for London at the British Overseas Airways counter, paying cash.

I was -told the flight was delayed. It wouldn’t depart until seven that evening.

I changed back into my pilot’s uniform and spent six hours papering Mexico City with my decorative duds. I was $6,500 richer when I flew off to London, and the Mexican
federates
joined the posse on my tail.

In London I checked into the Royal Gardens Hotel in Kensington, using the name F. W. Adams and representing myself as a TWA pilot on furlough. I used my alternate alias on the premise that London police would soon be receiving queries on Frank W. Abagnale, Jr., also known as Frank Williams, erstwhile Pan Am pilot.

I stayed only a few days in London. I was beginning to feel pressure on me, the same uneasiness that had plagued me in the States. I realized in London that leaving the U.S. hadn’t solved my problem, that Mexican police and Scotland Yard officers were in the same business as cops in New York or Los Angeles -that of catching crooks. And I was a crook.